information and communication devices are an unavoidable concern of modern infrastructures. There is a generalized perception (although no major related catastrophe has happened yet) that the probability and potential impact of security breaches have grown heavily in recent years due to the increasing interconnectedness among systems and organisations. It is also recognised that
potential chains of events, concatenated across interlinked infrastructures, could propagate magnifying the effects of perhaps minor triggering glitches.
The primary role played by electric energy and the highly dynamic context that characterises the new economic and organisational models of national deregulated
energy markets, put highly critical security issues on the power systems. This requires on the one hand robust technologies and architectures, and on the other effective
methodologies for the assessment of the security risks. The importance of the security aspects in the electric power field is confirmed by the constitution of security
working groups by standard organisations, such as the Working Group 15 “Data and communication security” (WG15) inside the Technical Committee No. 57 “Power system control and associated communications” of the
IEC – International Electro-technical Commission (IEC TC57).
IEC TC57 WG15 has published a Technical Report 62210 “Power system control and associated communications – Data and communication security” [1] which represents a valuable approach for introducing security in
power system control. In this paper we present a contribution to the security
analysis of power systems. Section 2 describes and comments on the IEC TR 62210 report; section 3 illustrates key aspects of our methodology under development.